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"No."

"No, what?"

"It wasn't mine to decide."

Something in my chest lets go so fast it makes me dizzy.

I reach out and take his hand. Still feels electric when we touch.

He lets me turn it over. The burn from the char still on my fingers, still shiny, still healing wrong because he keeps using the hand. The other forearm has a rip up the inside of it from the salt kill, edges gone silver.

I run my thumb along the burn, amazed at the energy I feel with the touch.

His breath changes.

"Does it hurt?"

"No."

"Liar."

"Okay, yes, a little," he says.

I don't plan the next part. My hand slides up his wrist to his forearm, over the ruined skin, and his whole body locks. I think about how he stood behind me on that step and let me shut the door myself when everything in him wanted to stand between it.

I pull him in by the front of his shirt.

He comes.

The kiss isn't like the one against the siding. That one was a collision. This one is deliberate, and slow, and it takes about four seconds to stop being either. His hands lift me on the counter, and my legs go around his waist. The sound he makes into my mouth is not a human sound.

Every candle in the house lights at once.

Not the ones already burning. All of them. The tote I never unpacked in the hall, the ones on the mantel, the box of tapers still in the paper in the front room. Light climbs the walls in a rush, and I feel it happen in my teeth.

Gage lifts his head. "Maren?"

"I know."

"Are you doing that?"

"I don't know. Probably. Don't stop."

He doesn't.

His mouth goes to my throat, careful of the fading bruise there, less careful about everything below it. My sweater comes off over my head and lands somewhere in the dark. His palms run up my ribs and he says something into my collarbone that I don't catch, and then the windows go white.

We both freeze.

Frost. On the inside of the glass, feathering out from the corners the way it’s been doing lately.

Gage is off me and across the room before I finish flinching, and he stands near the glass and breathes in.

I look at the stairs.

Sid hasn't moved. He isn't flat. His ears aren't back. He's sitting exactly where he was, tail curled around his feet, watching us with the expression of a cat who has seen a great deal and enjoyed none of it.

Consider a bedroom.